“Riccardo Muti will conduct a youth orchestra in an open-air concert launching the annual Ravenna Festival next month in what organizers billed Friday as Italy’s first live classical music performance since its strict lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus,” writes Colleen Barry in Friday’s (5/22) Associated Press. “The Italian government is permitting concerts and other live performances to begin on June 15…. Italy’s famed La Scala theater is looking at re-opening only in September… The open-air opera festival at the Verona Arena … substituted … classical music concerts in August.… The festival will open June 21 with Ravenna native conducting the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra, featuring musicians under age 30, inside the 15th-Century Rocca Brancaleone fortress. The audience will be limited to 250 people, with mandatory masks, staggered entrances and physical distancing. On stage, the performers will maintain a distance of one-meter (three feet), expanding to 1.5 to 2 meters (4 1/2 feet to 6 feet) between woodwinds. There will be a single singer, soprano Rosa Feola. The festival, founded 30 years ago by Muti’s wife, Cristina Mazzavillani Muti, will present 40 performances [and be] streamed to a global audience.”
Change font size
